


Life once again, one day.

by AlexielMihawk ENG (AlexielMihawk)



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Nonsense, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 06:26:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5237828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexielMihawk/pseuds/AlexielMihawk%20ENG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The problem is, when people die in a war, that you can’t stop and cry. You can’t grieve and you can’t scream. Sometimes you just have to keep going, and whoever falls just falls behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life once again, one day.

**Author's Note:**

> First of all: english is not my native languange, sorry for the mistakes, please feel free to signal them.  
> This story in a bit nonsense, more like a stream of consciusness analysing some of my fav characters in BoB; there are quotes from the series, and quotes from something else, and cheesy stuff, but there are absolutely no pairings.
> 
> There not a particular time setting, but we are toward the end of the war, still the war has not ended yet and there's still the possibility of dying.

 

The problem is, when people die in a war, that you can’t stop and cry. You can’t grieve and you can’t scream. Sometimes you just have to keep going, and whoever falls just falls behind.  
It’s sad and it’s unfair, but that’s how it works, that how you have to make it work if you don’t want to die, if you don’t want to become just a dull face in someone’s memory.  
Everyone reacts to the concept in a different way, a few endure the pain and find strength in the suffering, others pretend not to see and some, just some, crack and let the emotions prevail.  
  
  
Of course that’s bullshit, a pile of crap, as everyone knows that once you crack, once you surrender to grief you become useless and there no point in being a soldier if you can’t do your job.  
At least that’s what Ronald Speirs kept telling to himself when he first landed in Normandy, but now? Now he isn’t sure anymore.  
He remember saying, once, to a young soldier blocked by fear in a small hole in the ground, right next to Carentan, that the only hope left was to accept the fact that they were already dead. Anytime a bullet, a grenade, a mine could blow them up, it was just a matter of accepting it as a given fact, as something inevitable, so that they could function as proper soldiers: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse.  
But now? Now that the war is almost over he is starting to consider the possibility that he could have been wrong; he is not prone to die, he is not ready to see his men die. Those soldiers that once were so scared of him are now his family, they trust him, they fight with him and for him, and for that they would die, not for the country, not for justice.  
There’s no justice in war, they know that by now.  
Ronald Speirs has changed more than he likes to admit, but deep down he’s not bothered by that; somehow he has discovered he can be a better man than he was when everything started, he can be a better soldier, as he is not fighting alone anymore. He knows that, whatever happens in those last days of the war, someone will cover him, someone will have is back and he is slowly starting to realize that there is, indeed, still hope.  
  
  
Yet hope is a transient concept, that can change from man to man; let’s say someone sees it as salvation, that’s just his personal perspective, his point of view and that interpretation can change completely in the eyes of somebody else.  
Eugene Roe has never, not once, thought of hope as salvation, he doesn’t want to be saved, he doesn’t think of going back home, as a matter of fact he doesn’t even think he’ll get out alive from that hell.  
Not that it matters.  
Hope is a luxury he can’t allow himself to bask in; it’s been so long since the last time he’s thought of the word and he’s pretty sure it was associated to morphine. That’s what hope looks like for the doc: a syringe, a pack of aspirins, bandages.  
That is all he needs, that’s the kind of hope he can rely on, the one that lays in his hands and that guarantee his comrades – he doesn’t dare calling them friends because they die, oh god, they die so easily – another day.  
Gene is one of those men that find strength in their own pain; it’s not like he enjoys suffering or seeing people getting hurt. He just store all those feelings and after a while they start weighting on his chest, on his heart, but that’s how it works when you keep seeing people die, when you can’t save them.  
Either you break down or you keep going. And sometimes he’s this close to giving up, to leaving everything behind, because there are days so black, and so filled with death and blood that he thinks he won’t get to see them to the end, because how can he survive when everything around him keeps dying?  
But in the end he always come out alive, he always survives with the awareness that he can’t break and he can’t die, he can’t allow himself to get discouraged: he is the medic, he is the one that runs around and never get hurt, and, to some of his friends, he himself is hope.  
  
  
Funny how such a simple concept can vary so much.  
Webster would say that it’s just obvious, that words, like people, are mere containers and that the shades of significance are as much as the shadows of human souls. If someone would ask what hope is for him, he’d shrug his shoulders and quote Lord Byron: « _But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence. The least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of_ ».  
Of course no one asks him and to be fair he doesn’t care.  
He doesn’t care about hope and he doesn’t care about fear. Of course he’s afraid, he always is and he doesn’t want to die, but there’s something more, something he tries hard not to forget, not to left behind. It’s humanity.  
He walks in mud and despair, but never lets go of his dreams; he fights in fear an terror, but he never forgets who he wants to be. And he doesn’t just want to be David, the world is full of Davids; that’s why he keeps signing all his letters as Kenyon, so that he can be someone else, a better man, the man he wants to be and not the one the war is turning him into.  
No, this war won’t turn him into something he doesn’t like, it won’t turn him into nothing, he won’t allow that. He knows what happens when it starts running under your skin, into your vein, and it’s poison, a poison you can’t get rid of, as there’s no such thing as a cure.  
  
  
Sometimes he looks at Liebgott and he thinks that’s what’s happened to him.  
But who would blame him?  
War changes people. It turns them into animals and feeds on their anger and fear and rage, it envelops you in its cold arms and it doesn’t let go, not until you are as cold as she is, cold and dead. Joseph is not dead, not literally, but a small part of him, right next to his heart, is. It’s something that started to rot during the time he spent in Bastogne, and that after Haguenau, after the bloodshed, the terror, the stench, started to decay and in the end, in front of the long barbed wire of the concentration camp, it died. Joseph can’t say what it was, he still isn’t sure, but he knows he felt something breaking inside, right in that very moment, while his lips were moving, inviting the prisoner to enter the camp once again.  
Maybe Webster is right when he says he’s changed, Liebgott doesn’t want to deny it, there’s no point in denying the truth; he is different and everyone can see that.  
But how can you blame someone for changing? They say that men are shaping their destiny and their own persona with every decision they make, but that’s not true. Not for everyone, not for those who lived the war.  
War changes people.  
  
  
That’s what happened to Buck, when he saw his friends dying one by one, his friends torn apart by grenades and bullets. Sometimes, even if you fight with all you got, even when you think nothing can break you because you’ve turned to iron and to steel, even then, there’s a point when you just can’t go on.  
You want to, but you just can’t find anything worth fighting for, and then, again, what’s the point in fighting if you have no motivation? What’s the point in fighting when you become useless, and all you want to do is to cry, and cry, and cry?  
There’s no shame in grieving your friends, there’s no shame in sharing pain, in aching and suffering for the terror you’ve witnessed. Buck Compton is only human, after all, and he’s seen things, thing he wouldn’t want anyone else to see, thing he doesn’t want to remember, but he does. And in the end those memories are like ghosts, they walk with him, they flow right in front of his eyes and he can still see the blood, he can still smell the stink and he can still hear the screams.  
He curls and his fingers grasp the thick and scratchy blanket, that’s all he knows now: that goddamn thing is smelly and uncomfortable, but it’s all he knows, all he wants to know, all he wants to see.  
Maybe one day he’ll be better, until then he’ll keep grasping that blanket, whishing he was indestructible, wishing he was iron, wishing he was steel.  
  
  
And God knows how hard it is to be indestructible.  
Not even Nixon manages to. Well, of course, he tries, and he knows he’s that kind of man that won’t die, not even if you shot him dead. The alcohol helps, a lot: Vat 69, God blesses Scotland and its scotch. Behind the thin curtain that a glass of whisky provides, he can see things a little more clearly; he realises that dying in war doesn’t make you a hero, not ever, not always. Sometimes it does, but that bloody war is not a war of heroes, more like a war of horrors and they are just trying to get through it, alive.  
Sometimes alcohol helps, and the world looks a little bit better, a little bit lighter and lively, and maybe it is, he’s not sure. Others it just enhances the horror and the crap that life seems to throw upon him – and it’s not just about his wife, his dog, that fucking war, it about the dead, it’s always about the dead.  
Nix is tired and is sick of that shit, but he keeps going, because that’s what good men do, that’s the right thing (at least Dick says it is, and he know that if his friend says something then it must be true).  
At least, he thinks sometimes, he’s not the only one who’s indestructible.  
  
  
And it’s true, because Richard is too.  
He’s indestructible, he is iron, he is steel, he is hope, and he is fear, and kindness, and faith: that’s why they follow him, that’s why he’s in charge.  
Dick Winters is human just like everybody else, but there’s something within him that just puts him on a completely different level; maybe is because he never shows his feeling, he never shows fear, nor happiness, nor he trembles, but he keeps leading. Maybe it’s how he jumps in front of the enemy, running ahead of everyone, caring, trying not get them hurt, trying to keep everyone alive.  
No one knows, he surely doesn’t.  
Not that he would ever think of himself as “on another level”, he’s just what he is: a guy too attached to his company, trying to get them all out of that hell.  
He knows, he is aware that war is hell, and blood, and death, but he doesn’t let it affect him, he doesn’t let it destroy him or break him. Truth be told he doesn’t even think about it, he just keeps going, on and on, toward victory, toward home.  
And he is sure he’ll come back, in the end that’s what he has always known; there’s something at the end of this hell, and it’s not just hope, not just memories of the horror, or a shallow medal: it’s life.  
Life once again.  
He knows that by then the world will have moved on. The world will have emptied. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, they’ll be alive, and they’ll be free of the war, of the death, of the foxholes and of the flying bullets, forever bonded by the ties they created and by the blood they shed: a band of brothers.

 

 


End file.
